Watch our video interview with Tom for the scoop on his epic Starz drama, premiering tonight!

When you think back to your lessons about Leonardo Da Vinci in school, I’m sure images of an old, Italian inventor with a super-long beard come to mind. But the new Starz series Da Vinci’s Demons, premiering April 12 at 10 p.m., introduces us to a totally new — dare I say, “sexy” — Leonardo.

“Our Da Vinci is far more youthful, re-imagined as a young, swashbuckling, action-adventurer,” starTom Rileyexplains to HollywoodLife.com. “I didn’t know anything about him in his youth … and some of the stuff we found out is crazy.”

Among those “crazy” discoveries are Da Vinci’s “difficult” relationship with his father — and his many, many enemies.

“He was tormented by a lot of things,” Tom tells us. “He was illegitimate, he couldn’t inherit wealth, he had no formal education. … In our show, he doesn’t know who his mother is [and] he has repressed memories about his childhood he can’t get a hold of. And then, literally, there are his enemies that circle him — from the Vatican, from this cult called the Sons of Mithras. It’s all go.”

Tom Riley Previews Da Vinci’s ‘Darker’ Future

While the series premiere finds the show’s titular hero in a “celebratory” mood, Tom tells me things quickly go downhill.

“As the series progresses, things get darker for him,” Tom explains. “He finds his big mouth getting him into more trouble than he’d like — or maybe he does enjoy it. We also go to some crazy places, literally. We leave Florence and go to Rome, Romania … We travel all over.

Da Vinci’s Demons also boasts a few “steamy” scenes — this is cable, after all — which Tom happily discusses in our video interview below.